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This paper analyses the implementation of a procedure using the software R to calculate the Probability Density Function (PDF) of the product of two uncorrelated Normally Distributed Random Variables. The problem of estimating the distribution of the product of two random variables has been solved for some particular cases, but there is no unique expression for all possible situations. In our study, we chose Rohatgi's theorem as a basis for approximating the product of two uncorrelated Normally Distributed Random Variables. The numerical approximation of the product PDF was calculated using a function that we implemented in R. Several numerical examples show that the approximations obtained in R fit the theoretical values of the product distributions. The results obtained with our R function are very positive when we compare them with the Monte Carlo Simulation of the product of the two variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of product of two normally distributed variables come from the first part of the XX Century. First works about this issue were [1] and [2] showed that under certain conditions the product could be considered as a normally distributed. A more recent approach is [3] that studied approximation to density function of the product using three methods: numerical integration, Monte Carlo simulation and analytical approximation to the result using the normal distribution. They showed as the inverse variation coefficient μ/ σ increases, the distribution of the product of two independent normal variables tends towards a normal distribution. Our study is focused in Ware and Lad approaches. The objective was studying which factors have more influence in the presence of normality for the product of two independent normal variables. We have considered two factors: the inverse of the variation coefficient value μ/ σ and the combined ratio (product of the two means divided by standard deviation): μ1μ2/ σ for two normal variables with the same variance. Our results showed that for low values of the inverse of the variation coefficient (less than 1) normal distribution is not a good approximation for the product. Another one, influence of the combined ratio value is less than influence of the inverse of coefficients of variation value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of the product of two normally distributed random variables has been an open problem from the early years in the XXth century. First approaches tried to determinate the mathematical and statistical properties of the distribution of such a product using different types of functions. Recently, an improvement in computational techniques has performed new approaches for calculating related integrals by using numerical integration. Another approach is to adopt any other distribution to approximate the probability density function of this product. The skew-normal distribution is a generalization of the normal distribution which considers skewness making it flexible. In this work, we approximate the distribution of the product of two normally distributed random variables using a type of skew-normal distribution. The influence of the parameters of the two normal distributions on the approximation is explored. When one of the normally distributed variables has an inverse coefficient of variation greater than one, our approximation performs better than when both normally distributed variables have inverse coefficients of variation less than one. A graphical analysis visually shows the superiority of our approach in relation to other approaches proposed in the literature on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]